Not Stars
by kafkabythesea
Summary: AU, twenty-first century, global relations/hetalia centric. For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen first: A gaseous nebulae must collapse.


**Disclaimer: **The very first idea came from two webcomics made by yuumei on DeviantART, called 'Fisheye Placebo' and 'Knite'. However, how this storyline came to be, _I have no freaking idea. _I suppose this is AU? The original Hetalia Axis Powers was set in WW2, but it often deviated from the timeline so… :/ The characters of Hetalia Axis Powers belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya and anyone holding a real life position (ie. Prime Minister, CEO) are completely made up or merely _based _on current people holding such positions. I am not affiliated with government parties or companies mentioned and no copyright infringement is intended towards the mentioned companies or products.

"_Italics" = a different language (only used in speech)_

_Italics (not in speech) = emphasis_

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><p>. prologue .<p>

Not Stars

Not stars. They were not stars. In the drowsy smog of China's blinking skyscrapers and luminescent billboards- the stars were gone. Those faltering light bulbs living on batteries were nothing in comparison to the cosmic spheres of plasma that lived on its own forces.

For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen first: a gaseous nebulae must collapse*.

And crumble she did. Younger than three, the girl stumbled down the yellow and red mountains of Min Shan, passing over glorious, turquoise rivers of pulsating water, and danced her way across a giant lake*, crisscrossed with fallen trees that smelt of breath and time. Rarely did she give the life-blood red leaves that flashed past her a second glance, but that one time when she did, the girl met a monkey* with fur as bright and yellow as the gold that was buried deep under the Earth's crust. The monkey pointed her to the direction of a village, and in return, he plucked a slender, ancient hairpiece off her head and swung away.

A day murmured into three hundred and thirty days, and by then the trees around her changed one hundred and eighty degrees of green, yellow and red, over and over again, but the girl herself had not aged a single day over three. She had long lost count of how many steps she took to the east, and when she finally stumbled across the village, they welcomed her with open arms of vibrant red and yellow tassels. Their skin was several shades darker than hers and weathered from working under the sun, but the villagers still welcomed this child with wild hair and an outdated _qipao._

It was in that village, when the girl first aged. She was given a name –_Huang*__– _and she already felt a year older than that first time she stumbled down the mountain of gold. When the elder of the village touched her forehead with broken hands and breathed the meaning in her ear – _emperor –_ she felt her shoulders drop and crack from all those lives she was not yet living.

"_Yi, er, san, si, wu._" She watched the mouth of her first teacher move and the sound that entered her ears was as volatile as the leaves that dipped and rolled through the wind in the golden mountains. That singsong language, she was told, was called '_Zhong wen'._

The year she spent in the Tibetan village of Jiuzhaigou Valley changed her life. Each night as the moon rolled past the open window, she felt each humming character she learnt that day, breathing in and out with her. Her mind and her body reformed, changed and began to move as smoothly as the cool, mountain breeze. That year, she grew. She grew taller, her hair grew longer and her eyes turned from a curious chocolate brown, to the colour of an aged, oak wine barrel.

That year, the government officials came. A boy, barely sixteen, was growing vegetables in a simple plot of six by six, and was persecuted for agriculture in a protected, world heritage park.

She bit her lip.

The mountain was fine with it, but the government was not. She bit her lip even harder, when the mother of the boy shrieked and pleaded to the good and just soldiers, but was instead slapped and shoved backwards. "_Tibetan dog,"_ They spat at her. The sky was dark that day. The mountain was silent. It didn't breathe to her until later that year, when she was taken away.

Huang didn't struggle; only listened with blank eyes as the good soldiers stated to the villagers: '_this Chinese child is clearly not Tibetan and will be sent to a government-funded orphanage in the city of Chengdu*__._

The golden mountain of weaving rivers and turquoise lakes murmured goodbye, and for all that time spent together, it left her only two words: _Yong Xian_.

_Never changing, physically immortal and having achieved spiritual enlightenment._

Huang Yong Xian was adopted a week in.

"_How lucky." _The owner of the orphanage smiled sincerely at the middle-aged foreigners. _How lucky indeed,_ Huang thought sadly. In this great city of Chengdu, she left her last memories of China. In this great city of Chengdu, she met the Yangtze River, and it hissed and screamed at her, sobbing out the creation of history, of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.

"_The Empire inexorably dooms itself to in live history! To plot against history*__!"_ Muddy white foam lapped at her foot and Huang could only nod. "_This young child may not understand, but I do! I have seen it all! He will fall! The great man will fall and you will replace him!"_

"_Who,"_ fell from her lips faster than she could breathe and water lashed upwards with a hiss, leaving behind the name '_Yao Wang' _in her ears.

She heard his name again on the wide screen in the airport when she was on her way to Vancouver, and she could barely turn her head fast enough to catch a glance of the man Yangtze River cried for. But a glance was enough. She saw his smiling face framed by soot-brown bangs and that was all Huang ever needed to understand. His eyes were old. So old. He physically could not have been older than mid-twenties, and yet, the glint in his molten honey eyes spoke not of the future and aspirations, but of history – of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.

"_Empire inexorably dooms itself to live in history, to plot against history._" Huang repeated the Yangtze River's words as '_MISSING SINCE THURSDAY_' subtitles flashed across the bottom of the screen. "_For it is the fault of the Empire._"

/end.

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><p>1: Quote from AKIR on tumblr.<p>

2: The Five Flower Lake in Jiuzhaigou Valley, in the Min Mountains, in Sichuan.

3: A snub-nosed monkey.

4: There's a few meanings of Huang, the most common being yellow (黄), but I wanted to draw on the symbolism of both yellow/gold and being 'not human', so in this instance, it's Huang as the in the _Emperor of China_ (皇). This is not to be confused with the character for _Yellow Emperor_ (黄). However, there's no difference in sound. I know.

5: Capital of Sichuan province.

6: Quote from 'Waiting for Barbarians', by JM Coetzee. He's the winner of the 2003 Noble Peace Prize in lit, but regardless of the award, 'Waiting for Barbarians' is a bloody amazing book and everyone should go and buy a copy right now.


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